Semua Bab When the Alpha Howls: Bab 31 - Bab 39

“Your daughter lived.”The words did not echo, they should have. In a clearing ringed by wet pines and silent wolves, in a place where every breath seemed held beneath the low grey sky, words like that should have bounced off timber walls and stone paths and come back changed.Instead, they sank. Straight into Gideon Blake. The old Alpha did not move. His cane stayed planted in the earth. His shoulders remained squared. His cold blue eyes stayed fixed on Colton’s face.But something in him broke. I saw it before he hid it. A flicker, a fracture, a flash of such naked grief that my own breath caught as if I had stumbled upon something private and wounded in the woods. Then it was gone.“What did you say?” Gideon asked again.Colton’s jaw flexed. “You heard me.”Gideon took one step forward. The clearing reacted instantly. James moved from near the lodge doors, Sophia turned sharply and Ben stopped halfway down the path from the in

For a moment, the hallway seemed to narrow around the word. Veterinarian. She was not a hunter, an elder or hidden wolf in some fortified compound. She was a vet.My hand tightened around the folder until the papers bent. I looked down at the scan again. Avery Hart a veterinary surgeon at Ravensmere Wildlife and Domestic Care.My eyes snagged on the license number, the clinic address, the date of registration. The details were painfully ordinary. The kind of thing I would have glanced over without interest in another life.“She’s alive,” I said.My voice sounded too small. James’s jaw flexed. “We don’t know that.”Bailey flinched. Mara glanced at him sharply. James did not soften the words, but his eyes moved to mine with something like apology. “We know someone with the right trail existed recently. We know she used Evelyn Hart’s surname. We know she’s the right age range and profession. That’s all.”The right age range. I looke

“She’s coming home,” Colton said. Avery Hart had spent thirty one years being warned away from Moonbrook, away from the woods, away from names like Holloway and Blake. She was driving west with a dog in her passenger seat and a wounded hunter in the back of her clinic truck. That was not a woman coming home. That was a woman running toward the thing she had been taught to fear because every other road had become worse. Colton stood over the map, fever pale and still bleeding beneath his bandage. Gideon remained across from him, rigid with a grief so old it looked like anger because maybe that was the only shape it remembered how to hold. Mara broke the silence first. “If either of you starts behaving like a dramatic wolf monument, I will sedate you both.” Gideon’s eyes cut to her. She lifted one syringe from the tray without blinking. He looked away first. Bailey whispered, “I have never loved

“The wolf would wake.” Avery said it like a curse. With such raw, disbelieving terror that the whole infirmary seemed to pull inward around her. Colton had gone utterly still beside the exam bed, silver blood seeping through his bandage again, because apparently his body had chosen the worst possible moment to remind everyone it existed.Avery stared down at her hands. Her fingers were changing. Slowly and wrongly. Not in the clean, impossible way Colton had shifted in my memory from man to wolf, not even like Evan’s fevered claws under silver pain. This looked like her body did not know the path and was trying to carve one through itself.Her nails darkened at the roots. The bones under her skin shifted once, a subtle, sickening movement that made her gasp and stagger backward into the cabinet. Bottles rattled behind her.Moss barked, frantic. Mara moved. Avery’s head snapped up. Her eyes were not blue anymore. Amber burned through them, wi